Natural high-quality mink and fox fur enjoy exquisite gloss, and texture and defy attempts at manufacturing imitations thereof. Thus, natural furs remain expensive. As a status symbol or as super-high class fashion material for clothing, therefore, the natural furs remain in demand.
In the meantime, movements for the prevention of cruelty to animals and for the preservation of natural environments have been steadily gaining ground. The desirability of developing artificial fur closely resembling natural fur, therefore, has found approval and has aroused general interest.
Numerous piled fabrics have been proposed to date, some deserving the plain descriptive phrase "resembling blankets" and others genuinely deserving the promotional phrase "comparing favorably with natural furs."
The growing enthusiasm advocating the prevention of cruelty to animals has been encouraging the perfection of numerous inventions directed to the production of artificial fur-like piled fabrics in recent years.
Concerning the production of artificial furs, for example, the inventions disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 85,361/1974 and Japanese Utility Model Publication No. 15,816/1974 have been known to the art. Neither of the inventions, however, is fully satisfactory from a comprehensive point of view.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,737,702 discloses an invention relating to the production of an artificial fur using guard hair fibers tapered at opposite terminals in the sliver knitting. This artificial fur, however, has the disadvantage that guard hair fibers have poor affinity for the under-fur fibers, the guard hair fibers and the under-fur fibers are entwined or the adjacent under-fur fibers are mutually entwined, and these raised piles tend to collapse and the layer of raised piles lacks stiffness.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 61,741/1982 discloses an invention relating to a special fur-like piled fabric and a method for the production thereof. This invention pays no due consideration to the length of under-fur fibers or to the uniform distribution of hair length. The fur-like piled fabric produced by the method of that invention does not clearly show a two-layer piled texture similar to natural mink fur. Further, the piled part of this fabric constitutes an aggregate of long hairs and short hairs like the tip of a writing brush and, as a result, the raised piles are liable to entwine. When this fur-like piled fabric is converted into a cut pile fabric by cutting the raised loops thereof, the newly formed raised piles take up blunt chopped end faces, which impart a coarse touch to the surface of the cut pile fabric and make the cut pile fabric assume a whitely blurred appearance. In terms of the spinnability of the fibers for the pile, the allowable working staple length of fibers for flurry hairs has its limit on the short side because spinnability declines with decreasing staple length. The desire to obtain raised piles of short length and make the produced cut pile fabric show clearly a two-layer pile construction is fulfilled only with difficulty. Thus, this invention has much room for further improvement.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 95,342/1982 discloses a method for effecting separation of multiple pile fabrics by applying a sliding separation force to component fibers of pile yarns in the multiple pile fabrics. That invention forms an effective improvement in the process over the method disclosed in the aforementioned Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 61,741/1982. Similar to the product of this Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 61,741/1982, the product of that invention shows no clear two-layer texture and has a poor appearance. Moreover, it has the disadvantage that the raised piles in the pile fabric form an aggregate of hairs like the tip of a writing brush and, as a result, the raised piles tend to be entwined.
Japanese Patent Publication No. 64,536/1988 discloses a pile fabric that exhibits a pile fiber length distribution in which under-fur fibers form a uniform length in the lengths of hairs raised from the ground construction. That technique forms a further improvement over the method disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 61,741/1982. Similar to the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 61,741/1982, that technique relies for conversion into a cut pile fabric on the severance of pile fibers and, therefore, has the disadvantage that the cut ends of the under-fur fibers are blunt ends resembling nail heads, the raised piles are liable to be entwined, and the pile fabric is not satisfactory with regard to surface touch or appearance.